


My Days Have Been a Dream

by Rydain



Category: The Sexy Brutale (Video Game)
Genre: Background Femslash, Background Slash, Bittersweet Ending, Catharsis, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21895513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rydain/pseuds/Rydain
Summary: Lucas finally allows himself to remember, and then perhaps even to smile.
Relationships: Eleanor Bondes/Lucas Bondes
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	My Days Have Been a Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [muffin_song](https://archiveofourown.org/users/muffin_song/gifts).



> Lafcadio is a background character tagged to match a post-canon exchange request.

Lucas Bondes was never one to pray.

He tried, of course, when the occasion seemed to call for it. When Lafcadio began to ply him with scripture instead of another round on the house, with a curious lift of his eyebrows as if daring him to ponder its greater significance. When that barmy old friend traded the ice cream suit of a gambler for the cloth of the priesthood, the deed to his manor and private casino for the garret of a rectory on the stony edge of Dartmoor. From which Lafcadio journeyed back east to toast Lucas' engagement to Eleanor, to consecrate their marriage in the chapel of marble built to her designs on the grounds of his estate. A pious whim of luxury, an atonement of sorts for the vulgarity of the rest.

Lucas tried all the same when the red in his ledgers doomed him to bring down a house with no further hope of salvation. When the fire turned fatal from his own miscalculation, and he stood before the judge in silent remorse. When he kneeled in the dusty light through the bars of his prison cell, and in the twilit garden behind his cottage, tending flowers placed one by one like the headstones in the yard of a church where he had only once brought himself to take confession. Which was rather taken at the piano in his parlor, a careworn upright a few pins out of tune. A fitting irregularity, as was his rhythm in the hands of gnarled fingers, no longer marked by a pocket watch that had cracked when he fell from the clock tower, when time stopped with the crushing halt of gravity.

In that broken face of abalone, time rewinds.

* * *

_They were happy, you know._

Eleanor comes to Lucas as she always does, a whisper from the shadows cast by stained glass lamplight. Listening and waiting, refusing to leave, even when he tries to push her away for unwittingly tormenting him with such unearned compassion. She was never one to give up on him. She does not seem apt to start.

"There's no need to remind me." But Lucas' words are as tired as Eleanor's are assuring, even if their phrasing happens to echo the other voice, the worst voice, the one that had twisted every shard of glass still embedded deep within, the one that burned so long before it cooled to embers and took that mercy of leaving him. Which he hardly deserved, unless he did, as Eleanor has long since implied through a gentle insistence Lucas is losing the will to resist.

_But that's not what you see when you look back, is it? When you allow yourself to, that is._

Lucas cannot see that far back, at least not any more. At least he tells himself that before the smoke begins to clear, before the wreckage sears itself back into his brain. The aftermath, both real and imagined. The scorched husk of brick in newsprint, of the bodies as they must have fallen as he himself lay broken in a bed of flowers. The music still ringing in his ears from the phonograph in his secret workshop where he paced in wait of his grand entrance. Filtering back in to mock him, or perhaps to invite him - a thin frayed thread leading him back down the stairs of the clock tower, to the piano to fumble out fragments of its melody.

_That's a new one. A nice one. Rather like a breath of spring air. Though it still sounds so sad in your hands._

"Then it's just about right for the occasion, isn't it? All cocked up just like everything else." Lucas gives a strangled bark of laugh as he remembers more he would rather forget. Bad bets and broken hearts, spilled drinks and sometimes blood when the fists got to flying. Party games of his devising, temptations and trickery toward one more hand, one more hit of poison from the bar, one more treasure hunt through trap doors and secret passages that might very well end with a joker. "Just like the lot of it, really."

_You never meant for it to go that far. Any of it, even beyond the most painfully obvious._

"What else did I bloody expect? It was my house of vice. My addiction. My downfall. Theirs, too, even so long before that."

_For some, perhaps, but certainly not all. Not the ones that you can't bear to think of. The artisans, the architects. The musicians, the croupiers. They made the best of the Brutale, made it just as grand as you dreamed it could be._

"They died for my sins, Ellie." As Lucas has so often reminded her, and too often more harshly than he meant to. Now, he sounds downright deflated.

_Before that, they lived, perhaps better than you've brought yourself to remember. Perhaps that would make it so much harder to forgive._

That old voice, that cruel voice of a golden forked tongue, had whispered the opposite before taking its blessed leave. That those convicts and addicts and cheaters and troublemakers already had one foot in hell, and the rest must be hiding some flaw just as fatal to call Lucas that close of a friend. That Lucas had tempted them into the worst of that and more he might not have been privy to, and cut it all short before any of it could be made better. Which was, of course, a lie - though with a remnant of truth that still burned.

"There's still too much to answer for. Too much left unsaid." Lucas blinks back a snapshot of a finely carved rocking chair, a cradle forever empty and waiting. "Unfulfilled."

_That's what you see, then, isn't it? What could have been, more so than what was. As if they're at rest, but not truly at peace._

A long flinch back from the stab of that, a wry half smile already starting to twist like a faucet tap. "So then I'd be in good company, wouldn't I?" 

Eleanor leaves Lucas to decide as he trails off into silence, as the keys blur and his eyes flutter closed against a fresh well of tears. Not like the lid of a coffin or a mausoleum door, but a curtain hung from the rafters, and she waits with him in that velvet darkness until the drape begins to part.

* * *

Lucas feels for the keys and straightens his posture as masks fade into view around candlelit tables. He plays from the wings as Redd does onstage, a tick behind the precision of that head croupier's natural metronome. A cold and lovelorn dirge as Tequila swans to her spotlight, her brace of bare shoulders belying the weight in her heart. As do Redd's, broad in his sweater vest as his head bows over the piano, his lidded eyes somber with a sadness beyond empathy.

The song is wordless, a silvered knife of melody calling too much to mind. Tangos and tea time, late nights on that very piano bench with her perfume so sweet by Lucas' side. How it had lingered to haunt him when he began to drift away, when to stay would be just too unseemly. As did Tequila's voice when she brought herself to sing for him once more - and for Eleanor, too, as a favor Lucas came to regret for its inadvertent cruelty.

But this piece is not that blessing of their engagement, nor the unbridled cry of soprano at the masquerade ball where it was announced. It begins to soar with another sense, a hopeful sense, as Tequila parades before the footlights with her upswept head held high and her ball gown trailing behind her. She sings to the front row, to a mask of bone and black, and the wave of applause carries her offstage into a firm clasp of Willow's hands. Vocalist and vodouisant stroll off, arm in arm as they would through the estate gardens before the party kicked into full swing, as near as they sat in their shadowed corner of a guest parlor with books of arcane arts that had Tequila covering a gasp as Willow could not help but smile.

Redd smiles just as coyly beneath the horns of his mask, segueing to a moonlit sonata as Greyson approaches from the remnants of audience with a tentative hitch in his swagger. Lucas picks up the floating arpeggios as they draw into a dance, closer than any courtesy granted to the sequined belles of the masquerade ball, their masks a breath apart above mouths poised as if about to kiss.

Sunset floods the great hall of gilded marble for all the rest to join the floor. Clay emerges from casino surveillance to help Trinity chase any trophy there might be for the taking, Reggie from the basement workshop where he is tinkering with a top secret automaton. Thanos invents new ways to spin his wheelchair, to which Aurum shuffles right along as his heart allows. 

Fashionably late but somehow still right on time, Lafcadio takes the bandstand to call for a toast with consecrated wine. _To the master of the house and the lady of the manor. To friendships forged and memories made, forever no matter how fleeting. To be held in the heart for a fond look back, though perhaps not an extended holiday._

Lucas laughs along with everyone else, full as his glass is with tears. Though for once they are more sweet than bitter, and he drinks of them until the band takes five and the rest go their separate ways, until he returns to his piano bench in that careworn lamplit parlor. At which he rises for bed and a spot of tea beforehand, helped up and on his way by the lightest hand on his elbow.

**Author's Note:**

> Your request gave me such inspiration to embrace and explore the tragedy of the most well executed game story I could never bring myself to replay. I enjoyed this chance to delve into some fresh angles of Lucas' grief and regret and self-punishment, to give him a way to look back fondly without overstaying his welcome, and to hint at resolution for the deep emotional desires that broke my heart when the full force of story hit me. I hope this suits you, pun very much intended as always.


End file.
